Our Gods Wear Spandex (22 page)

Conway's Dirty Harry knockoff, the Punisher, first appeared in 1974 in
Amazing Spider-Man
#129. The character took elements from Batman and the Shadow, and later cross-pollinated with Charles Bronson's character from 1974's
Death Wish
. The Punisher's adventures were published in magazine-format comics that were not subject to the Comics Code Authority. The Punisher was originally an honest cop named Frank Castle whose family is killed by some random thugs while picnicking in the park
(Marvel Preview
#2). Castle then reinvents himself as a Spandex-clad executioner who unleashes his considerable arsenal on slightly more realistic opponents than those he would face in the color comics.

The Punisher's popularity waned in the late Seventies and he was reduced to sporadic appearances in other character's titles, until the crack epidemic gave him new life. He was then given his own title, where he spent most of his time battling crack dealers and drug lords. The character had particular resonance with the same scared urban kids who worshipped Batman. His skin color may have been problematic, but his methods were not. The Punisher became the avenging angel for a particularly horrid period in urban history. He was featured in two film adaptations, one in 1989 and one in 2003. The first never made it into U. S. theaters; the second was made far too late to resonate with a Golem-hungry mass audience.

The groundwork for the success of the first
Batman
movie was laid by another film that drew heavily on
Dark Knight. Robocop
, released at the height of the epidemic of drug violence in 1987, offered up an even more explicit Golem than Batman. Directed by the gleefully nihilistic Dutch filmaker Paul Verhoeven,
Robocop
told the story of Alex Murphy, who is killed by a drug gang and resurrected as a cyborg by the evil Omni Consumer Products Corporation. Robocop is controlled by a host of computer programs in much the same way that the Golem is controlled by the spells of Kabbalah. As in many Golem stories, Robocop ends up turning on his creators when he finds they are in cahoots with the gangsters who killed him in his human incarnation.

Robocop
borrowed many plot points and stylistic flourishes from
Dark Knight
. But Verhoeven, infamous for his love of grotesque and sickening violence, added a few wrinkles of his own that later rubbed off on
Dark Knight
author Frank Miller, who subsequently signed on to write
Robocop's
two sequels.

A Golem of much lesser note is Spawn, the creation of Canadian cartoonist Todd McFarlane. An occult spin-off of Batman, Spawn was once Al Simmons, a government hitman who finds himself in Hell after being murdered. He makes a deal with Satan to do his bidding and returns to Earth to round up renegade demons. Spawn has made his creator extremely wealthy with a whole line of comic books, video games, and toys. Spawn was also the star of an animated series on HBO and a moderately successful 1997 feature film.

Another death dealer with more marked Golem overtones is Wolverine, the star character of
The X-Men
. Created by Len Wein and John Romita, Wolverine first appeared in 1972 as a minor villain in an issue of
The Incredible Hulk
(#181). In 1975, he was introduced in
Giant Size X-Men
#1 as a member of that mutant brotherhood. His popularity inspired the rise of the lethal superheroes of the 1980s.

Wolverine is a Mutant (a new race of people born with innate superpowers) who is abducted by a shadowy military cabal to be used as a test subject in a super-soldier program. His skeleton is remade of an indestructible metal (adamantium) and vicious, retractible metal claws are implanted into his hands. Often depicted as a feral semi-human, Wolverine earned his nickname by his short stature and hirsute appearance. One popular gimmick used by his writers has Wolverine flying into an uncontrollable rage, necessitating the use of several other superheroes to bring him to ground.

A big hit for Marvel, Wolverine has been used in thousands of comic-book stories and is often drafted when a particular comic-book title needs to increase its sales. As portrayed by Australian actor Hugh Jackman, Wolverine is the undisputed favorite character in the
X-Men
films, and, as of this writing, a solo film is reportedly in the works. It's interesting to note that Jackman pulls off an uncanny Dirty Harry impersonation in his portrayal of Wolverine.

The comic-book Amazon is essentially the female counterpart of the Messiah archetype. Female superheroes have always been problematic, however, with the comics' predominantly male fans. Younger fans tend not to be interested in female characters and older ones tend to objectify them as sex objects. The most successful female characters have, therefore, been members of teams—Jean Grey, Rogue and Storm in
The X-Men
, and Scarlet Witch and the Wasp in
The Avengers
. Other female characters have been sidekicks to popular male heroes—Hawkgirl, Black Widow, and the Black Canary. Wonder Woman is by far the best-known of the superheroines, and her audience has always been predominantly male. Young girls are generally not interested in superheroes and gravitate more toward romance, humor, and teenage comics.

The Amazon comes to us from Greek mythology. The word itself is of uncertain origin, some claiming it comes from the Aryan root
ha-mazan
, meaning “warrior,” while some believe it comes from the root
amastos
, meaning “those without a breast”—a reference to the fact that Amazons reportedly removed their right breasts to facilitate archery. Homer referred to the Amazons as the
Antianeirai
, meaning “the man-haters.”

There are several references to Amazon tribes in literature. Greek heroes like Hercules and Achilles fought them, and they are reported to have fought in the Trojan War. The horse was a magical totem to these Amazons, who, legend tells us, invented the calvary.

Although many scholars today believe the Amazons are simply a myth arising from observations of undomesticated barbarian women or female animals in the wild, Plutarch credited them with the sack of Athens and Herodotus said they were absorbed into the Scythian nation. It is certain, however, that there were warrior goddesses like Diana, Athena, and Nike in the Greek pantheon. There were also fierce goddesses like Ishtar and Sekhmet in other cultures.

With the rise of feminism in the 1960s, a new crop of Amazon characters appeared on television—Emma Peel in
The Avengers, The Girl From UNCLE
, Batgirl, and Catwoman. The Seventies introduced Blaxploitation characters like Foxy Brown and Cleopatra Jones. The success of long-running series featuring sexy Amazons, like
Charlie's Angels, Police Woman
, and
The Bionic Woman
, eventually inspired a TV revival of
Wonder Woman
. Amazon characters have been less prominent in recent years, however, a result of a post-feminist spirit that argues that femininity best exerts a powerful control over men. Female aggressiveness appears to have fallen out of fashion.

The ultimate feminist icon was not invented by a woman, but by an extremely peculiar man named William Moulton Marston (1893–1947). A true Renaissance man, Marston was a psychiatrist, a novelist, a journalist, a pioneering feminist, a bondage enthusiast, inventor of the polygraph, and a practicing polygamist. He was ambivalent about the emerging comic-book industry, first writing a defense of comics in 1940 for
Family Circle
magazine and later lambasting the comics
in an article in the
American Scholar
, saying their “worst offense was their blood curdling masculinity.”
¹³²
Regardless, he offered his services as a consultant to various publishers, and was hired by Max Gaines to consult for All-American Comics, DC's sister company. Seeing how much money was changing hands in this new industry, Marston decided to try his hand at creating his own character.

Marston originally called his new heroine “Suprema,” but All-American editor Sheldon Mayer renamed her Wonder Woman. The strip was illustrated in a whimsical and archaic fantasy-illustration style by the 61-year-old cartoonist H. G. Peter, who used several attractive female cartoonists as his assistants. Wonder Woman was outfitted with a skimpy, star-spangled swimsuit and a magic lasso worn at the hip, and traveled hither and yon in her invisible plane. The heroine's look was apparently modeled on Marston's younger wife, Olive Byrne.

Marston subscribed to a dualist worldview in
Wonder Woman
. He suggests that mankind is under two opposing forces—Mars, god of War, and Aphrodite, goddess of love. He believed that women should conquer men through the power of love and ensure peace on Earth for eternity. As a consequence, his stories tend to fall in a gray area somewhere between fairy tales, pagan hagiography, and soft-core porn. Marston said of his creation: “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world. There isn't love enough in the male organism to run this planet peacefully. Woman's body contains twice as many love generating organs and endocrine mechanisms as the male.”
¹³³

Though Marston's portrayal of Wonder Woman is a primer on classical paganism and mythology, he took great liberties in fashioning Wonder Woman's complex identity. She's not merely a female superhero; she is a pagan goddess. She is sculpted from mud by her mother, Hippolyte, at the command of the goddess Aphrodite, who then gives her the breath of life. As such, she is also a female Golem in the classical sense. Wonder Woman recalls Captain Marvel in that she enjoys the patronage of several gods. She has the beauty of Aphrodite, the strength of Hercules, the wisdom of Athena, and the speed of Mercury.

Wonder Woman's Amazon cohorts wear bracelets as a reminder of potential slavery to men and live on the idyllic Paradise Island, which is ruled by Queen Hippolyte. These Amazons are portrayed as ultra-feminine goddesses, not man-hating warriors as in the old myths. Aphrodite is a frequent guest star in Wonder Woman's adventures; Mars is a frequent villain, representing everything women must fight against.